Stop Watching Netflix and Start Having Fun With Cars

SOME LUCKY PEOPLE GET HELP when they need it. Years ago, I got it from my friend Bill Caswell. Bill is an over-caffeinated, quasi-employed, irritatingly attractive race car driver whose primary income, he once told me, is "hard to explain." ("So," I replied, "… sex work?") I was in a period of mild depression, a year of mostly lolling around and working on my motorcycle. I had a job, but my wife and I had just moved to California and were effectively broke. For a number of reasons, my free time was basically spent waiting to go back to work. I watched a lot of cartoons.

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Bill gave me endless hell for this. When I finally got off the couch, he gave me less hell. It began when he decided to try stage rallying. ("I have all these crappy, worthless old cars," he said. "We should kill them in the forest.") He needed a co-driver. The plane ticket was too expensive, but it was rerun season, so I went.

Our first race was NASA's Rally Tennessee, in 2009. Feeling saucy, I strapped into the passenger seat of a rusty BMW M3 that Bill had found, half-abandoned, on the south side of Chicago. Locals had been using it as a brothel, which may have been a gentler life. We built the car in three sleepless days, then slammed down the highway to Tennessee.

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Five minutes after the start of the rally, the BMW sat crashed in a ditch, the front bumper playing tonsil hockey with a tree.

"I'm sorry," Bill said.

"Well, I mean, it's your car," I said.

"Now we can go drinking!" he said, with perhaps too much enthusiasm.

Later, while convincing a bartender to sell me an oil drum of bourbon, I stared into a cocktail napkin and decided that it was better to have loved and lost, or something. (The memory, predictably, is fuzzy. And reeks of paint thinner.) Five minutes of speed and laughter now seemed a better brain implant than an encyclopedic knowledge of Futurama. Also, I couldn't remember why it had ever been different.

Emptying my glass, I vowed to never again get lost in a couch cushion. I then marched back to my hotel like a knight errant and proceeded to make out with a pillow for nine hours, fully dressed. As one does after Big Whiskey Decisions.

The next morning, the moment still seemed like an accomplishment. Or at least the sighting of a problem, which is almost as satisfying. But why is it always easiest to do nothing? To not go outside, have an adventure, get lost and answerless for a bit? Maybe because real life is occasionally exhausting, and you can't always get enough rest. Lack of action begets itself. And then you wake up one day and notice the race tires in the basement have dry-rotted. The project car is covered in dust. The bike is full of stale gas. It's been months since you tried something indefinite.

I mention all this because my wife recently gave birth. The process kept me tied to the house, as it does. I didn't want to go too far from town in case the baby came early. After, I couldn't leave, because there were new-baby jobs to do. The usual stuff.

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But lately, it's gotten easier to get out. (My long-suffering wife has insisted upon it, actually.) And … I haven't.

Like a lot of homes, my house holds bits of bric-a-brac. One is the bent rear A-arm from the '65 Lotus Elan I sold a few years ago. I bought the car because a good Elan is mind-blowing. In time-honored fashion, I sold it after growing too familiar with the Sisyphean job of keeping an old Lotus healthy.

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The A-arm was barely bent, but corrosion suggested it had been like that for a while. Maybe the previous owner didn't know. Maybe, I thought, as I cut my hand wrestling with the Elan's frame, he was just too smart to fix it. The recipes for mind-blowing too often include a pound of flesh. Who hasn't cheated the mix a little?

At any rate, the car found a new owner. I hung the old A-arm on my office wall as a reminder: At worst, saying yes brings lessons. No just gets you what you've already got.

Which isn't to say you can't lose ground. Last Saturday, I sauntered into the living room and opened my Netflix queue. Huh, I thought, I've watched everything on the list. Then a brief moment of alarm: Wait. No one in history has ever watched their entire Netflix list. That would require months at home doing nothing, and …

The next morning, I hopped in the car and aimed for the hills. Despite having a few good excuses not to.

I live in Seattle, a city with car ferries. One carried me from town just after dawn, to a road snaking through the Olympic Mountains. It began to rain on the ferry and didn't stop until that evening, as I pulled back into the driveway. Smoky weather, with fog weaving through the firs at eye level. The kind that reminds you you're moving.

It ended up being eight hours behind the wheel. Not much, but a start. Lying in bed that night, oddly calm, I could still smell the wet trees.

It's funny, the things you do to ward off your bad habits. Sometimes it's nothing more than informing others of their presence. As if communal awareness keeps things at bay. I don't know if these words are that. But I do know that lately, I've been thinking a lot about that ditch. And that the TV needs to go unplugged for a few months.

Can't imagine I'll miss much. At minimum, I've mapped out every inch of that couch.

Sam Smith is an editor at large for R&T. Born in Kentucky, he prefers Blanton's for heavy thinking.